Poultry

An incubator is an essential tool to be able to be able to target your growout to holidays, and reliably breed for selected, desired traits.

Why is there an opportunity in breeding chickens?

For one thing, the industrial raising of chickens has eroded genetic diversity in what was once an extremely diverse domestic species placing most of the world’s chicken production in the hands of mega corporations,

By using proprietary genetics, they can maintain a dominant market share.

To many people it seems obvious that chicken raising is a potentially very profitable small to medium scale low capital cost enterprise, and it is. If you have good genetics to go along with the enhanced management.

Foreigners mistakenly believe that intensive and semi intensive management of village chickens is the solution.
On the face of it people think, well just stop letting your chickens run around and feed them. Unfortunately that is completely wrong.

The scavenging chicken has a production cost approaching zero in cash, and it is not adapted to being caged and fed for fast growth. It will not respond.
It will only lay 50 or less eggs a year, birds that lay a lot of eggs are not good mums, the two traits are opposite.
So it is not just so simple as feeding them.

Khmer chickens bring a premium price of 30-40% over factory raised birds.
Those industrial birds are created from 5 line crosses that are impossible for small farmers to create.

100 years ago, there were many dual purpose chicken breeds that were good for meat and eggs, the Rhode Island Red is still foundation stock for a lot of the industrial crosses. Australorp is another one that is still surviving.

Both are meaty and fast growing with egg production over 200 eggs a year. The first cross offspring will share these traits, but will revert to the common genetics in the next generation. So if you breed back to the purebred you will begin to develop a new genetic line that can be developed into a new purebred. Simplistic explanation but mostly true.

I see this, along with vaccination as being a path to a profitable occupation here in Cambodia in chickens, with a very good chance to create a new purebred line or two using the existant dominant phenotypes seen in the khmer flock.

CP company is already doing this in shed type production in both Thailand and Cambodia.

The true goal is to produce real purebred chickens with dual purpose character that will throw true to type over generations.